1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of parsing varying formats of print stream data, and, more particularly, to an extensible framework for parsing varying formats of print stream data.
2. Description of the Related Art
The internal function of a data stream handler is defined by the data stream handler itself. A data stream handler appears to an application as a module to read and write a specific type of data stream. A consistent stream interface makes the source and destination of the data stream unimportant to the application that uses the data stream handler. A data stream handler processes one type of data and its output appears as a data stream to an application. A data stream handler can provide data that it manufactures or it can receive data from a file for an external source in a format that an application can use.
In computer systems, information may be passed from one computer process to another computer process using a named pipe. A named pipe or message holding place is given a specific name. Unlike a regular pipe, a named pipe can be used by processes that do not have to share a common process origin and the message sent to the named pipe can be read by any authorized process that knows the name of the named pipe. A named pipe is sometimes called a FIFO (first in, first out), because the first data written to the pipe is the first data that is read from the pipe. An advantage to using a named pipe is that the name associated with it allows other processes to easily locate the information. Loading a named pipe is useful in the processing of data streams.
Converting data into an extensible mark up language (XML) improves the functionality and adaptability of information contained therein. XML is actually a metalanguage for describing other languages, which lets you design your own customized markup language for limitless different types of documents. In contrast, fixed formats such as HTML is a single predefined markup language. XML is a markup specification language, which can be used to design ways of describing information consisting of text or data. The description is normally for storage transmission or processing by way of another program. The XML format says nothing about what should be done with the data, although the choice of element names may hint at what they are to be used for. For example, an XML document describing the characteristics of a machine part does not carry any information about how the information should be presented to a user. However, an element name of “Material Type” may infer that the content relates to the type of material of which the machine part is made. An application is free to use the data to produce an image of the part, generate a formatted text listing of the information, display the XML documents marked up with a particular color scheme, restructure the data into a format for storage into a data base, transmission over the network or input to another program, etc. XML documents can be generally regarded as purely descriptive data files.
What is needed in the art is a method to transfer a varying data print stream into XML documents.